1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to design of heating method, and more particularly, to a method of heating a target device in a computer system.
2. Related Art
If an electronic device (such as a notebook computer) needs to actuate or operate in a low-temperature environment, a heater (such as a hard drive heater) is required to heat the specific hardware module (such as a hard drive). However, no matter controlled by hardware circuitry or application software/firmware, the conventional heater in the prior art can only simply heat with a fixed heating power, or heat with different heating powers corresponding to different temperatures.
Please refer to FIG. 1. Temperature curve W1 indicates a temperature-time curve of a device when heated by the conventional heating technology in the prior art. In the conventional heating technology, only heating to reach a target temperature Tf is considered; the temperature changes occurred within every time interval during the heating process is not considered. Namely, only when the device is heated to achieve very close to the target temperature Tf (or even exceed), can the heating be ceased or the heating power be decreased. Therefore, the generated temperature curve W1 indicates a parabolic curve, which shows the unsteadily-rising rate of the device temperature.
Please refer to FIG. 2. Temperature curve W2 indicates a temperature-time curve of a heat-sensitive (the temperature rises rapidly when heated) device while heated by the conventional heating technology in the prior art.
The initial device temperature Td0 and the target temperature Tf is the same as in FIG. 1. But if the same conventional heating technology is applied to the heat-sensitive device, the generated temperature curve W2 shows the temperature rising in a severe and rapid scale.
Furthermore, in FIG. 2 the temperature curve W3 shows a temperature-time curve of the device when heated by the conventional heating technology in the prior art; only the initial device temperature Td0′ is different from the initial device temperature Td0 preset for the heater.
When the initial device temperature Td0′ is different from Td0, since the conventional heating technology uses the normal heating power to heat the device, the temperature curve W3 indicates that the device has already reached the target temperature Tf before finishing the preset heating duration F1, which inevitably causes the device overheated to reach a high temperature.
As a brief to the foregoing, when applying the conventional heating technology to an electronic device, there will be some problems including the unsteadily-rising temperature, the temperature changed instantly and rapidly, and the unexpected heating time. As to the heat-sensitive device, the heating mechanism can not be manually adjusted. Besides, once the heater changes its different heating source or the characteristic resistance of its heating medium, or the heater is used to heat different devices, the heating effect can not be perfectly predicted and controlled, and consequently, there will still be dramatic variation on the temperature curve.